Atlanta Mayor Quotes

and he petitioned the city of Atlanta to name October 11, the date of the conference, Henrietta Lacks Day. The city agreed and gave him an official proclamation from the mayor’s office.

In July 2016, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed invoked King’s spirit and the power of free speech but then explained to reporters the large police presence at demonstrations following police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile: “Dr. King would never take a highway.”21 There is something deeply ahistorical and ironic to call for voices muted, tactics softened, disruption avoided, and more honorable spokesmen located, when these very criticisms were lobbed at the civil rights movement as well. And there is something convenient, too—a way of justifying remove, by making it seem as if people would join movements such as BLM if the upstanding likes of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were part of it, but these new movements were just going about it the wrong way. Looking more deeply into the Black freedom struggle challenges such misuses of civil rights history and reveals the politics behind this mythmaking.

IN JANUARY 1959 Police Chief Herbert Jenkins found a poem tacked to a bulletin board at his departmental headquarters. Tellingly, the anonymous author had titled it “The Plan of Improvement,” in sarcastic tribute to Mayor Hartsfield’s 1952 program for the city’s expansion and economic progress. The poem looked back over a decade of racial change and spoke volumes about the rising tide of white resentment. It began with a brief review of the origins of residential transition and quickly linked the desegregation of working-class neighborhoods to the desegregation of the public spaces surrounding them: Look my children and you shall see, The Plan of Improvement by William B. On a great civic venture we’re about to embark And we’ll start this one off at old Mozeley Park. White folks won’t mind losing homes they hold dear; (If it doesn’t take place on an election year) Before they have time to get over the shock, We’ll have that whole section—every square block. I’ll try something different for plan number two This time the city’s golf courses will do. They’ll mix in the Club House and then on the green I might get a write up in Life Magazine. And now comes the schools for plan number three To mix them in classrooms just fills me with glee; For I have a Grandson who someday I pray Will thank me for sending this culture his way. And for my finale, to do it up right, The buses, theatres and night spots so bright; Pools and restaurants will be mixed up at last And my Plan of Improvement will be going full blast. The sarcasm in the poem is unmistakable, of course, but so are the ways in which the author—either a policeman himself or a friend of one—clearly linked the city’s pursuit of “progress” with a litany of white losses. In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.

Some Black Americans who were accused of crimes during the Jim Crow era were thrown into work camps while in prison. There they labored decades after slavery had been abolished. People in convict work camps in Atlanta are known to have helped construct buildings that still exist today, like the federal penitentiary and homes in the upscale neighborhood Inman Park. That legacy in Atlanta is tied to a former mayor from the 1880s, James W. English. He owned the Chattahoochee Brick factory, among other businesses, and according to a book by the journalist Douglas Blackmon, English’s companies managed 1,206 of Georgia’s 2,881 convict laborers, who made bricks, among other manual jobs. English’s “great personal wealth was inextricably linked to the enslavement of thousands of men” decades after slavery had been outlawed, Blackmon wrote. In addition to the convict-staffed brick factory, English owned a bank that merged into Wachovia, which is now part of Wells Fargo. From these businesses, his descendants had money and opportunities to build more wealth: a great-grandson, James D. Robinson III, went on to serve for twenty years as the chief executive of American Express, and then he had wealth and connections to help his son, James IV, found a venture capital firm in 1994. That firm, RRE Ventures, became one of the most successful and lucrative venture capital firms in the world. Robinson III referred our question about the era of convict leasing to a relative by marriage, who told us, “It was a black mark, and history is messy.